Knowing where your prospect is in the marketing funnel will help you target them with the proper marketing materials. Let’s help you identify the stages of the purchase funnel and help you find out where your prospect is and how you can target them with personalized marketing.
What is a Marketing Funnel?
A marketing funnel, or a purchase funnel, outlines the stages of customer awareness about you. At the top of the funnel, we have the awareness stage. During this stage, the customer learns about their problem and your product or service. The prospect is aware of their problem, and they also become aware of what you or your product does to help them solve the problem.The middle portion of the funnel is the consideration stage. At this stage, your prospects already know about you and consider using your service or product for their problem. This is often the most important funnel stage, as you’ll need to push the customer to convert.The lowest and last part of the funnel is the conversion stage. This is the point where the customer is willing to buy from you. Only a small percentage of your visitors will make it to this stage.Your goal as a marketer is to push your customers to the next stage of the funnel, depending on which stage they find themselves in. You’ll need to know where your prospects lie in terms of their interaction with you. This will allow you to set up personalized marketing for each type of customer to push them to the next stage within your funnel.Targeting someone at the top of the funnel who isn’t aware of their problem, and your product with sales pitches will make you seem intrusive and spammy. On the other hand, targeting someone at the bottom of the funnel with blog posts or emails will provide little to no value to them, which will turn them away.
Strategies for Each Stage of the Funnel
Now that you know about the stages of your sales funnel, it’s time to take a look at what you can do at each stage to drive your customers down your funnel.Your ultimate goal will be to get as many prospects as possible to convert, so you’ll have to carefully design your marketing strategy so that it caters to the right type of customer. This all comes down to the stages of your funnel and the position of your customer.
Top of the Funnel - Awareness Stage
At this stage, the prospects are not yet aware of you, and you want them to become aware of your service and your product. You’ll need to create value so that the potential customers trust you more and that they will have no problem purchasing from you when the time comes. At this stage, the most important thing is to give as much value as possible to your customers.How do you do that?Providing engaging and helpful content and email campaigns will help you push the prospects down the funnel. Here’s what you can do at this stage.
- Create engaging and informative content and articles. Perhaps the most important thing you should do at this stage is to rev up your content marketing engine and create top-notch blog posts and articles. You’ll need to stand out from the crowd by winning SEO (easier said than done) and providing more value to your customers than your competitors. This will take time and effort (as well as money), but ultimately, it will be worth it in the long run.
- Amp up the social media content. You should embrace the power of social media and attract leads this way. This includes writing unique posts on your social media channels every day. This could be simple posts, videos, images, infographics, or other types of posts. The goal is to pick 1-3 social media channels and constantly put out quality content.
- Use advertising to your advantage. Another great way to attract more leads to your funnel and push them down the funnel is to use advertising. This could be offline or online advertising on Google or social media.
Middle of the Funnel - Consideration Stage
So now that you’ve got your visitor to the consideration stage, you’ll need to step things up a little and push them to take action on your site. You will ultimately want them to buy from you, so you’ll need to create trust in this stage.Your goal is to build trustworthiness and display value in the services you offer.You can do that with the following strategies.
- Perfect your email marketing. At this stage, email marketing is perhaps the most important strategy you can utilize. You will want to set up automated email campaigns and newsletters that provide value to your visitors and create trust. This will also take a lot of time and effort to create and optimize, as you’ll need to constantly test what works and what doesn’t.
- Make use of free trials and demos. If you have a product or a service that can be tried out, then it’s wise to offer this to your customers at the consideration stage. It provides a win-win situation for both you and the customer. It gives a chance to the customer to test ride what you have to offer while giving you a better chance of conversion down the line.
- Create classes, video guides, webinars, and instructional content. To build more trust, you can create instructional content at this stage. By creating such content, you’ll not only show what your product or service can do, but you’ll also show your visitors how they can use it in the future.
Bottom of the Funnel - Conversion Stage
This is the thinnest part of the marketing funnel. Only a small percentage of all of your visitors will reach this stage. It’s now your job to finally convince the customers to buy from you.You can do a few things to push the button and complete the sale, such as:
- Harness the power of social proof. Customers who are now willing to buy from you want to make completely sure they are making the right decision. You’ll need to incorporate positive reviews from other people who have already bought from you so that you help them make the final jump.
- Demonstrate. Perhaps you could offer your visitors to demonstrate how your product or service works at this stage?
- Use discounts and other special offers. You can also consider adding special offers to individuals who are willing to buy from you. Not only will this make it more likely for your visitors to buy, but you’ll also build loyalty and trust for future purchases from you.
- Calls to action. You’ll need to know where and how to incorporate calls to action in your materials. However, this will take a lot of split testing and trial-and-error to get right.
You’ve already done well to retain a lot of interested visitors and get them to the conversion stage. Most of the hard work is already done, now the customers just need one final push to make the purchase. The conversion stage of the funnel will take a lot of optimization and testing, too.
Knowing Where Your Customer is Will be Crucial for Marketing
People inside your sales funnel require different things. Someone who’s not already willing to buy from you will probably feel turned off if you push through sales pitches and materials that come at the bottom of the funnel.On the other hand, marketing your customers at the bottom of the funnel with informational content will also not be highly effective. It might work, but a different approach is needed at this stage.The ultimate goal is to pinpoint your visitor inside your funnel. This way, you’ll be able to personalize the marketing materials you push through to each individual, making your whole campaign much more successful as a result.To be successful at recognizing the patterns of where your customers are, you’ll need to do constant testing and tracking. This way, you can help your customers go down the funnel and ultimately, get them to take the desired action you want to take. If you need help with identifying or creating your sales funnel, schedule a call with Ampry and get help from highly trained conversion specialists.